American Orchestral Works
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: William (Howard) Schuman, Bernard Herrmann
Label: Classics
Magazine Review Date: 9/1992
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 52
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 37135-2
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Symphony No. 1 |
Bernard Herrmann, Composer
Bernard Herrmann, Composer James Sedares, Conductor Phoenix Symphony Orchestra |
New England Triptych |
William (Howard) Schuman, Composer
James Sedares, Conductor Phoenix Symphony Orchestra William (Howard) Schuman, Composer |
Author: Edward Seckerson
Four horns in unison give out a spacious five-note summons. The summons is repeated, as if demanding a reply. When none comes, the music grows suddenly agitated: a tense, driving figure counterpoints the questing theme. Urgent development. This composer knows about space—the great outdoors: he has to be American. He also knows about advancing a narrative, creating drama, intrigue. But the really interesting thing about Bernard Herrmann's big and vital Symphony No. 1 is its abstraction. Certainly it is romantic and emotive in its gestures—but not in any Hitchcockian sense. Herrmann (who scored a string of Alfred Hitchcock films, to say nothing of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane) is plainly relishing his 'time-out' from the movies: no confines, no specific images or mood to underwrite—freedom to explore and develop. It is a stimulating excursion for him: you can feel it, for instance, in the way he toys with his oboe-led second-subject group, fashioning an uneasy and complex pastorale from intertwining woodwind voices.
Herrmann's sense of development is always compelling, often deceptive, surprising (that much he will have learned from movie narrative), but it is the free spirit, the improvisatory nature that gives this work its energy. His scherzo marries elements of danses macabres and ''The hunt'', the yearning clarinet melody given out at the start of his andante sostenuto, elicits a doleful response from solo trombone (the winter of discontent from Mahler's Third Symphony revisited), and his finale—a kind of Dionysian dance suite—somehow manages to filter in a whiff of the Orient with a surprise departure involving flute and antique cymbals.
A worthwhile revival, then; and a decent forthright performance. James Sedares and his orchestra are technically far better (less drily) served here than they were in their recent Copland collection (4/92). Even so I still wish the sound had more beef and body, particularly in the strings.
The outer movements of William Schuman's New England Triptych—one of my favourite American pieces—cannot be beefy or punchy enough. And here the Sedares band perhaps lack that last degree of rip-roaring audacity to do full justice to the craggy timpani-driven syncopations and flaring horns and trumpets of ''Be Glad Then, America'', but more particularly to the hymn turned raucous marching song, ''Chester'' which should, but doesn't quite, go out in a riotous tattoo of percussion. All the notes are in place, but I don't quite see stars—or stripes.'
Herrmann's sense of development is always compelling, often deceptive, surprising (that much he will have learned from movie narrative), but it is the free spirit, the improvisatory nature that gives this work its energy. His scherzo marries elements of danses macabres and ''The hunt'', the yearning clarinet melody given out at the start of his andante sostenuto, elicits a doleful response from solo trombone (the winter of discontent from Mahler's Third Symphony revisited), and his finale—a kind of Dionysian dance suite—somehow manages to filter in a whiff of the Orient with a surprise departure involving flute and antique cymbals.
A worthwhile revival, then; and a decent forthright performance. James Sedares and his orchestra are technically far better (less drily) served here than they were in their recent Copland collection (4/92). Even so I still wish the sound had more beef and body, particularly in the strings.
The outer movements of William Schuman's New England Triptych—one of my favourite American pieces—cannot be beefy or punchy enough. And here the Sedares band perhaps lack that last degree of rip-roaring audacity to do full justice to the craggy timpani-driven syncopations and flaring horns and trumpets of ''Be Glad Then, America'', but more particularly to the hymn turned raucous marching song, ''Chester'' which should, but doesn't quite, go out in a riotous tattoo of percussion. All the notes are in place, but I don't quite see stars—or stripes.'
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